Movie Review: Brooklyn

4 stars out of 5

Sometimes, in these United States, a swarthy boy will fall in love with a clean Irish girl. And every once in a while, she’ll love him back. Now, in terms of Irish women, the filmmakers here were really stacking the deck by casting Saoirse Ronan as the lead. A year and a half ago, I developed one of those movie crushes I get from time to time when she appeared in The Grand Budapest Hotel. In Brooklyn, Ronan gets to stretch her acting skills a bit, and does not disappoint.

The year is 1952, and Ronan plays Eilis from Enniscorthy (who? from where?). But there weren’t many opportunities for an Irish lass, so with her sister’s help, Eilis sets off for the bright promise of America. She settles in the titular New York borough, then a popular destination of immigrants from Europe instead of from, you know, Ohio. Thanks to priest Jim Broadbent, Eilis is pre-hooked up with a room in a boarding house (run by Julie Walters, hamming it up just a tad) and a department store job, where she’s overseen by Megan Draper. Zou bisou bisou!

Though she has the basics, adjusting to new environs is difficult for Eilis, until she meets the aforementioned swarthy fella. It’s Tony, the Italian, who likes the Brooklyn Dodgers! Ay, fuggedaboudit!! Tony is played by Emory Cohen (hmm, that ain’t an Eye-talian name no-how. But we’re equally swarthy, don’t kid yourself, boychik). Cohen plays Tony with real sweetness and earnestness, and not so much that you’ll wretch or anything.

And of course Saoirse Ronan is the main attraction. Her Eilis is dignified, ambitious, reserved, fragile, quietly sardonic, sweet, sentimental, and most certainly open to love. My movie crush continues unabated.

For a while, I wasn’t totally sure what to make of Brooklyn, and that was OK; I was simply enjoying it. Yes, it’s a classic immigrant tale, but not with the heft of, let’s say, Barry Levinson’s Avalon. Was it more of a gentle love story, then? Ah, but the plot takes a turn, as plots are wont to do, and the film begins to truly reveal itself. Because it’s really focused on everyone’s individual tug-of-war between the past and the future. The familiarity, comfort, and guilt associated with what’s expected of you by family and the old crowd (that pull represented here by the wow-he-gets-a-lot-of-roles Domhnall Gleeson), versus the desire to break free and be one’s own person.

Not an earth-shattering tale, but well told and performed, and certainly relatable. I didn’t know till the end credits that the screenplay was by my old fave Nick Hornby — nice work, fella. (OK, except for a very clichéd evil shopkeeper back home.) Bonus points for a very satisfying ending. Now come on, casting directors, we want more Saoirse!!